Flow has always provided the ability to reference various field types from SharePoint ranging from Text and Boolean (Yes/No) to Person and Choice. However, SharePoint actions in Flow didn’t allow you to set or write to complex fields like Person, Choice, Lookup, and Managed Metadata. That changes today! It gives us great pleasure to announce write support for Person, Choice, and Lookup fields, one of the most highly requested features on the Flow Ideas Forum.

Let’s look at a quick example to learn more. Imagine that you have a SharePoint list to track Travel requests. This list has the following fields. Notice how it’s a mix of Text, Date and Time, Choice, Person, and Lookup. 

Let’s now create an approval flow for incoming travel requests using this template and point it to the Travel Requests list.

In the Yes branch, let’s add a new action, SharePoint – Update item, and point it to the same site and list as the trigger. Notice how the Update item action now includes all editable fields from the list. The same applies to the Create item action also.

Furthermore, the list of possible values for the Choice (Approval Status) and Lookup (Team) fields are the same as those presented in SharePoint. For the Person field (Backup Engineer), you’ll have to type in a valid email address.

We hope you can make use of these new additions as you build out new flows and enhance existing ones.

Known issues

There are two known issues with this release that we will be addressing in the coming weeks.

1. Once you have created your flow, if you add a new Person, Choice, or Lookup field to your list, attempting to edit and save your Flow will result in an error at runtime. To work around this issue, you must delete and recreate the Update item or Create item action in your flow.

Note – This applies only if you edit your Flow, otherwise the flow will continue to run.

2. To write to a Person field, you must enter a valid email address for an individual in your organization.

Coming soon

We continue to invest in our SharePoint + Flow story and want to ensure that Flow is a worthy successor to SharePoint Designer workflow. Some of the upcoming features on our connector roadmap include:

• Support for Managed Metadata fields (aka Taxonomy)

• Support for document library metadata

• Support for multi-values fields

• Support attachments for list items

• Support content publishing workflows

Share your feedback using the comments below. Have a question or an idea? Head over to the Microsoft Flow Community.